Slashdot Mirror
US Military Uses 8-Inch Floppy Disks To Coordinate Nuclear Force Operations (cnbc.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via CNBC: A new report reveals the U.S. Defense Department is still using 8-inch floppy disks in a computer system that coordinates the operational functions of the nation's nuclear forces. The Defense Department's 1970s-era IBM Series/1 Computer and long-outdated floppy disks handle functions related to intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear bombers and tanker support aircraft, according to the new Governmental Accountability Office report. The report shows how outdated IT systems are being used to handle important functions related to the nation's taxpayers, federal prisoners and military veterans, as well as to the America's nuclear umbrella. "Federal legacy IT systems are becoming increasingly obsolete: Many use outdated software languages and hardware parts that are unsupported," the report found. "Agencies reported using several systems that have components that are, in some cases, at least 50 years old." From the report: "GAO pointed out that aging systems include the Treasury Department's 'individual master file,' which is the authoritative data source for individual taxpayers. It's used to assess taxes and generates refunds. That file 'is written in assembly language code -- a low-level computer code that is difficult to write and maintain -- and operates on an IBM mainframe,' the report said." The report also mentioned that several other departments, such as the departments of Treasury, Commerce, Health and Human Services and the Veterans' Administration, "reported using 1980s and 1990s Microsoft operating systems that stopped being supported by the vendor more than a decade ago."
I hope they don't click the red cross... or we are all fucked...
We really should applaud them. Imagine how hard it will be to figure out how to write code to hack this.
This kind of "back-end" software is EXACTLY the kind of thing that contractors DREAM of. Nobody knows how it works, and the general public never has to see it, so they can't complain about it being a piece-of-shit that they paid for.
It's just like the air traffic control system "upgrade" they've been working on for nearly 30 years. The contractors have ZERO incentive to ever provide a working product. Much better to keep in in development forever.
I'm not one of those "government can't do anything right" people, but this is one of those things that is just a tailor-made pork-barrel disaster. I see why they don't want to even bother trying.
They've been stable for decades. I'll take master files on floppy disks and programs written by people who cared over "eventually consistent" databases developed by "just good enough" monkeys any day.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
If I notice a quantity of 8" floppies dropped around a parking lot next to an inconspicuous government building, can I assume that some sort of Stuxnet cyber attack is under way?
Security through obsolescence.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I'd be curious to know how many of these seriously outdated systems are egregious piles of failure; and how many are utterly contrary to any fad of the week from the last three decades; but where done right the first time and actually compare pretty favorably to the results of (the so often horribly doomed) 'upgrade' efforts.
Some flavors of outdated are fairly clearly bad; if you can't get replacement hardware without raiding a museum or reverse engineering and cloning/emulating quirky 80s gear all by yourself, keeping your systems running is going to be unpleasant and expensive. If you have a system whose security depends on an OS or other 3rd party components that have exciting known vulnerabilities and haven't had vendor support even under a thrillingly expensive special extended contract with the vendor in a decade, you have a problem.
If you have a legacy system that is merely retro; but well built and supported by hardware you can still get without much trouble, you will certainly get your share of snide comments about its dreadfully antique design; but you are taking a real risk in trying to modernize it. Those sorts of 'upgrades' don't always fail; but agonizing, wildly expensive, upgrade attempts that languish in development so long that the upgrade is obsolete before you've finished deploying it are hardly uncommon.
Sure, in an ideal world, we'd all get to implement from scratch with all the benefits of hindsight and absolutely no accrued technical debt; but we don't live in an ideal world. How many of these systems are old as in broken; and how many are old as in classic?
The government doesn't want anything in general release in these situations. A large old floppy isn't readable or writable by the average Windows computer. This creates "security by obscurity" that makes it harder for a non-authorized command to be run. We don't want some kid playing Thermo-Nuclear War.
The military using special technology is a good thing from a security perspective. It is not supposed to run on Commodity hardware and software, because if anyone can work on it everyone potentially has access.
Stop playing the narrow minded "cheap is good" game and consider other reasoning. Longevity is a good thing, not a bad thing. Specialized knowledge in security is a good thing, not a bad thing. It's only government waste because you are only considering a very minor aspect.
By the way, if they were using "new tech" it would not last for half a damn century. It would have been stuffed in the trash every couple years, like we do with the majority of our servers today who have an average lifespan of less than a year before the first malfunction causing a hard stop.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
There's probably more rationale here than many realize.
I'd doubt it. More like,
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
It amazes me that our so called analysts then laugh at Russia for what they sometimes called its "rustbucket military hardware."
That was until [in Syria], it delivered a shock to us us in the west, with its successive wins on the battlefield, despite having less hardware compared to the west's.
I worked at a bank that had several mainframes IPL-ing from 8" floppies - I left the bank at the end of the 90's - at that point, the system has been operational for more than a decade. As far as I know, not a single floppy has ever failed during the years I've been there, or before my tenure.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
but can it end civilization?
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
Sounds to me like tax-payer dollars well-spent on equipment that keeps on giving.
Maybe your typical gamer has to upgrade every coupla years because the latest Doom doesn't run well on a 4-year old GeForce. Maybe Macy's needs to upgrade their mainframes because they have way more inventory to deal with and want to offer more sales online. And maybe we all need to upgrade off Windows XP (looking at you, banks, with your hackable ATM's) because it was a lousy, full-of-security-holes platform in the first place.
But as Microsoft tries to force me off my perfectly workable Windows 7 for no damn reason, I wonder why a machine bought by a government department, that does the job and does it really well, needs to be upgraded or swapped out for something new that may or may not work because of something non-related to whether the damned thing does the job and does it really well. Replacing such a system is not easy, particularly when there are consultants circling overhead, hungry for a fat government contract so they can build a complete clusterfuck out of overpriced commodity hardware that does nothing approaching what the old system did. And needs to be upgraded all over again in 2-3 years.
Yes, on the one hand, holy shit! those are old floppy drives. On the other hand, holy shit! they still work and do the job after all these years. Why have we grown so accustomed to throwing shit out every coupla years? Seems to me, government (state and federal) is one of those areas where shit oughta stay the same for a while so people can focus on getting the job done, rather than re-learning and re-tooling every few years just because some software vendor wants to sell another release of something.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
WOPR or really the idea behind it is EXACTLY why we use 1950's technology still in our nuclear silos.
Think about it. If you own an operational nuclear tipped missile, your primary concern is that it is only going to detonate when and where YOU want it too. Also figure that you realize that this thing is going to be sitting for decades, hopefully with a minimum of mess and fuss over things like maintenance and refurbishment. It may sit there for multiple decades, but it HAS to work when you push the button under adverse operating conditions. This means you need a really robust system that's easy to take care of.
ALL of these requirements mean you will choose the most simple design that fulfills your needs. The one with the least parts, especially those parts that move, and once you have a proven design, you are going to be loathed to change it just because it's out dated. Once it works and proven there will be NO changes without some seriously good reasons. Newer is not always better. You don't mess with a design that works, just because it's old.
Couple this with the fact that the government is where the obsolete is always in style and it's never simple (nor cheap) to change anything and you can see why stuff like this takes on a life of its own. Why change it? It works and we don't need anything else that's better.
One more thing that comes to mind.. Nuclear weapon development is subject to international treaty oblations. I don't pretend to know all the details, but I'm fairly sure that we cannot just go out and replace our current crop of nuclear missiles w/o having issues with some treaties.... Not that Putin could do much about it if we unilaterally decided to do something, but he'd sure be crying foul and loudly if we did.. Not to mention the political fall out from that...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Here's the actual Government Accounting Office report, if you want to read it instead of a Slashdot story about a news story about the report.
That's the major problem though. It's not that it is a bad thing, precisely, to have a system that works for 50 years. The problem is that logistics and support is horrendously complicated.
Probably the only way that this is still even partially maintainable is because the government is single-handedly propping up production of 8-inch floppies, which probably now cost something like $20,000 a piece. Not only because they are low production runs, but because on top that, they probably have to be built to a particular government standard that no one has updated since 1970 to make them able to be trusted for controlling nuclear weapons while also being handled by barely trained 18 year olds.
nt
Yes. But the story was forwarded to Slashdot via UUCP/dialup with a 12 hop bang path. So we only just got it.
Have gnu, will travel.
And what exactly is wrong with that?
New shiny stuff is much scarier...
They can last awhile, but if they haven't been recently producing them, these have probably been stockpiled for 20-40 odd years. The disk media may well last that long, but the mechanical drives have a way of becoming misaligned and destroying the media over time. It's unlikely that in 40 years this has not happened at least a few times. It's one thing to pop a disk in that you've only intermittently used into a drive after 30 years, another entirely to have it either being in that drive all the time, or being inserted and removed repeatedly. You're going to have failures and they're going to need to be replaced every so often. Perhaps they have a large enough stockpile of them, but it would make me pretty nervous to have to rely on them lasting.
But, let's face it, its the government itself who did the study and wants to replace them. They have done the work to determine why they can't be using these forever. I don't even really need to speculate.
The programs written for the weapons are the only item run on the computers for a reason. The code is trusted and audited which is way more important than new and flashy. Changing or updating the underlying OS or code requires a new audit and verification.
The calculations can be done longhand for verification.
Read the rainbow series for more info if they are still in existence.